Tim Hoare has died. I re-read his Turing acceptance speech. Following paragraph felt poignant. “….At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way– and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay.”
I had less than ideal on-boarding at new job. I was reminded some aspects of “Indian Workspace” I often hear people complaining on Reddit. Most of the things are fine but folks don’t care about notification sound being loud, talking next to you or having long and loud meetings. Moreover, everything lives in people head, not in documents. You must have meetings for doting ‘i’ and crossing ‘t’. Daily standup can last one hour!
Bengaluru has flower season. Its a pity that garbage on the road kills the view that could be spectacular. The GKVK campus road is blossoming.
Ookie can easily make 3-5 words phrases like “how about this one”. She is now 25 months old.
Ookie is 1 month old on March 17, 2024. These flowers were collected from a neighboring tree.
It was a pie day this week and I didn’t do anything. Not a single friend left in Bengaluru who reminded me of or would get excited about it. Last year, we had apple pies at 3:14pm.
This week, we visited Pondicherry on a three days vacation.
I started when Somya informed her plan to stay there for few weeks and she invited us to stay with her family. She informed dates in advance. I planned to visit this weekend. Later we got to know that Anjali was there as well during the weekend.
If you are planning a trip with a toddler and a well-behaved dog, following is my tldr.
Puducherry is not as dog friendly as Bengaluru but it didn’t feel hostile either. Prefer to stay a little outside the city where you can find easy place for your dog to go. We were inside the city and find a place for Kaalu to pee/poo was tricky. Carry your dog poo scooper with you.
[White Sand beeach](https://maps.app.goo.gl/HeSYTz9HCx2Y2bdTA) is a good place to go if you have a dog. The parking is very easy to find at this beach. Not much crowd! There will be too many dogs on the beach but they didn’t look dangerous. They just barked at Kaalu for a while and then stopped bothering her. There are many many beaches that are dog friendly just outside the city.
Promenade Beach is good for walking during night and early morning. The city doesn’t allow vehicle on the beach road hence it is very toddler friendly. Keep you dog on short leash, no matter how well behaved the dog is, since many people are pretty scared of dogs.
We decided to drive by car. Ookie is now comfortable inside the car. The inflatable bed that I bought when Anu had plaster on her ankle is serving us really well on these trips. Kaalu sometimes gets pretty stressed and anxious inside car, especially during the day time traffic, so we tried calming tablets and they do wonders for her. I should use them during Diwali when the whole country turns into a loud gas-chamber!
Driving car to Puducherry from Bengaluru wasn’t the most pleasant experience, especially in the late evening. Almost half of the route was two lane highway. Overtaking slow trucks or auto and avoiding overtaking cars and buses from the other side was also tricky. A lot of vehicles have very bright headlights these days, including small autos, which makes is very hard to see anything when these lights flash in your eyes. The roads were in good shape and except of a speed-breaker that I didn’t see, most of the travel was without any bad bump. We lost 30 mins inside Bengaluru traffic and 45 minutes in a sudden jam on highway. It took us more than 8 hours to reach Pondicherry!
I think I got some “bio-fuel” (ethanol blended) on the way from a BP/Jio petrol pump. That made car pickup worse and it stinks.
We reached at Somya place around 9pm and slept after having dinner. Next day, we went to a beach. Neither Ookie nor Kaalu enjoyed the beach. It was their first time and both were scared of big waves. Also, late February turns out to be a little too warm to be on the beach during day time. Unlike west coast (e.g. Mangalore, Mumbai), the beaches in Pondicherry are not shallow and waves are bigger, stronger and dangerous.
Kaalu and Ookie didn’t like wave crashing near them! Kaalu liked the little crabs on the beach but fear of waves took the fun away. Ookie enjoyed playing in the sand though and Kaalu would dig some sand and lay on it.
I got to meet old friends and more. Ookie enjoyed the night time at Pomegrade beach. Fortunately, city doesn’t allow vehicle on the beach road and it made all the difference. She walked freely on the beach road. We also bought a funny musical instrument from a road-side vendor. She also enjoyed playing with another toddler in the house who taught her how to jump down the bed!!
(clockwise from top) Dilawar, Kaalu, Anjali, Somya, Anu, and Ookie
I didn’t find Puducherry to be very exciting. But again, I don’t find cities to be very exciting. Food is good but food is usually good in all cities.
The botanical garden was OK but has nothing worth really visiting. Great for toddlers though. It didn’t have any especial tree or plant to excite me. The flower garden was lame and poorly maintained — I’ve seen better personal garden. The aquarium was also pretty meh but much better than garden. Ookie enjoyed her time inside the aquarium. Sadly, the choo-choo train is broken and is just a show piece now. Perhaps we need the British back to ensure things work?
Ookie and Me in a broken choo-choo train at Pondicherry botanical garden. It’s a shame that this train doesn’t work because they have pretty good track inside the park!
Beaches are not as dirty as in Chennai but they are not clean either. Occasionally you see broken glass in the sad and put your sandals back on. Our civic senses needs to improve a lot! Also, streets are not walk-able in Puducherry as well, except for one street in Pomegrade beach where they don’t allow cars. I found too many bikes parked on the road most of the time. Bengaluru is definitely worse!
The local food was very cheap and good and the tea was excellent. I am a great fan of tea making in both Tamilnadu and Kerala. Its a shame that Karnataka and rest of the country hasn’t adopt this method.
While coming back, we left at 12:00pm. Diving was a pretty decent experience in late night. I didn’t feel sleepy since Anjali was awake in the car and we chatted whole way. By early morning, we were barely awake. It took us 5:30 hours to enter south Bangalore where we met with decent traffic at around 5:30am! It took me 45 minutes to reach home after we entered Bengaluru. Kaalu was pretty happy to see Jumbi and other friends.
This plant is now ubiquitous — its everywhere in my neighborhood. Kaalu likes to eat its leaves. Ookie is fond of its green berries. Now, I am alarmed and thinking of cutting down most of them in my neighborhood.
Replacing the AMT unit of my Tata Nano XTA will cost me :rupee:1,30,000 which is a bit crazy. A local mechanic Gajendra (Vinayaka Motors) seems to found a cheaper solution which is affordable. Let’s see how it goes.
Nano is getting a bit smaller for me now. I usually travel with 3 people (including me), one medium size dog and luggage. Nano is barely enough. I am looking for spacious car with good safety rating. Looks like Tata Tiago may be a good candidate.
I did some browsing on https://www.spinny.com/ and OLX for comparing prices of second hand cars. Spinny is a good place to buy a car but for selling. I’ll probably sell Tata Nano XTA using the mechanic and buy one from Spinny. I am still not buying a new car!
I am at age when the proverb “can’t teach an old new tricks” is more and more applicable. Also working with a different age group is becoming a challenge since weights on values changes with age. The young can spend 10x time on the a task due to bad planning or execution, redo is four time, waste a lot of time and still declare it a “win”. I guess it is what is it 🤷🏾.
How can you judge a programmer from her resume? Its not hard.
Lemma: How you do anything is the way you do everything!
Means carelessness you show in your resume will also be present in the code you are going to write. If your resume is careless written, has typos, and handing sentence, your code will have similar bugs. It shows you don’t care about your work!
If your resume is verbose, disjointed and have bad formatting, means your code will also be similar. It also shows, you don’t think about “why”. If you write and send your resume without asking “why” this resume for this job, you are going to do the same thing at job. You will write code without every asking “why”. If may be fine for some people!
I personally give a lot of weight to formatting and presentation, perhaps as much as I give to the content. If you don’t format and layout your resume neatly, that means you are not into UX or DX. Working with you is going to be a lot of pain. You code will probably work but a few folks will be able to read and understand it. You lack empathy! Be kind to your reader. Make your resume easy on eyes — pick right font, use non-hostile layout and keep is short.
Ookie daycare has independence day celebration. Anu found a costume for her.
Notion raised the Plus plan’s monthly cost from $5 to $12, which I grudgingly paid. I guess time to ask for a raise 😆. Even though AI is often pushed down my throat, Notion is very good at what it does. I use it for nearly all of my work.
It was is just too much hassle in migrating to Joplin or Obsidian. Besides publishing and syncing services cost roughly the same.
Notion is mostly being built in a high-income country and I am in a medium income country. I understand that I need to pay this price. We need more software and service that are built and used by folks in same income range like Zoho is for business. Only if they have something good for personal use.
I can wish all I want but I am unlikely to see such great homegrown solution unless we have homegrown customer willing to spend money on such solutions (Innovation starts with consumers, not academia).
At work, I am more willing to take responsibilities and ownership — lead role. I was reluctant before and wanted to remain IC for a while to avoid dealing with people problems. I was naive, people problems always find you!
And I didn’t do any planned work on my personal projects. Perhaps time has come to make peace with the fact and I can do only one or a few things in life properly.
For the last couple of weeks, Ookie has been going to a day-care for a few hours. She gets to play with other kids there. “Playing with other kids” has been the reason for sending her there. After a few days of fuss, she now seems to be enjoying her time there. My very friendly neighbors think that she is too young to go to day-care!
Somehow I managed to run 400 km so far! My pace has been slowest. I still need to complete 600 km in the second half of the year.
I’ve started paying for RUNALYZE. It is nice that more and more services are offering purchase-parity plan for subscription for Indian users. I’ve been using jonasoreland/runnerup: A open source run tracker for a long time to sync my runs with Runalyze/Strava. One dollar=Rs 100, but it is roughly Rs 30 in purchase parity, so you have to reduce the pricing by third for Indian users! If you are doing this, I’d be happy to work for you for a purchase parity adjusted salary😛.
I had a minor meltdown at work 😭. Not proud of it. It’s hard to keep cool when many co-workers write almost empty email without a subject/body to report bugs. I’ve been trying to get them to use GitLab issues for a few months now. Either, I need to disengage from work a little at this workplace, or find a place where co-workers are adults and not only they come to work but also know how to structure and plan it.
I read Programming as theory building : Naur.pdf and found it illuminating. I am pretty sure I’d have yawned reading it some 10 years ago. This article — written a year before I was born — put “programmers” at the center of software development. I don’t think I can reduce this article to soundbites. Do read. I learnt about this article from HN.
– I wrote another small utility to remind me that a LWN article has finally become open. I am not able to pay for LWN subscription due to HDFC Bank related issues and I forget to revisit the link when it is open. Perhaps I can rent a VPS in this money and read the article two weeks later?! LWN is a great resource and I feel bad for not paying for it though!
– My Wallet from Budgetbakers is no longer syncing with HDFC Bank. Their support is working on the issue. HDFC seem to have changed their login flow again! My another bank, DBS Bank, doesn’t have saving account API🤣. I opened account here thinking that they are “tech-savvy”!
– I’ve been thinking about hiring a lot these days. At my current company which is an early stage startup, they have been struggling to hire a dev for the last 5 months! I was part of a few interviews — some went well and most were meh, but not able to hire for 5 months feels a bit extreme!
– Both mango trees in my street has mangoes this year! Here is my daughter Ookie playing with her friend. Fortunately, like many streets in Bengaluru, this street is a dead end and have no traffic.
